I wrote recently about how birds sang jazzier tunes during last spring’s pandemic shutdowns. There was little traffic on the highways and other roads. Other than anxious trips to the grocery store to load up on toilet paper, cleaning supplies, booze and baking ingredients, people were hunkered down and staying put.
For the last year, different results of that lack of traffic have been filtering through.
The drop in traffic din and other noise pollution was immediate and obvious, noticeable even to Great Two-legged Galoots like Nature Boy. It was the first summer in decades when he was able to sleep without earplugs when the window was open.
Within a few weeks, something else became clear (so to speak). Earth-monitoring satellites recorded clear skies and less atmospheric pollution. Hospitals and clinics in many countries were reporting fewer emergency asthma cases.
It took a bit longer for the first estimates of the restrictions’ effects on atmospheric CO2 levels. Many people hoped that, if we had to suffer socially and economically from the pandemic, it might at least improve in that way. They were pointing to the experience as a social experiment that would inspire us as a society and point to what needed doing to meet the targets set out in the Paris Climate Agreement.
The 2016 Paris Agreement aims to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions in an effort to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, while seeking to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees.
Global temperatures currently are rising at around 0.2 degrees C per decade.
In October, the initial indications were good. Researchers reported that the pandemic had resulted in one of the largest drops in global CO2 emissions in history, based on near-real-time data collected during the first half of 2020. Compared to the same time period in 2019, CO2 emissions had dropped almost nine per cent — a drop larger than that determined to have taken place during the 2008–2008 financial crisis, the oil crisis of 1979 or the Second World War.
However, the same study also noted that countries’ emissions bounced back after lockdown restrictions eased during the summer.
Last month, final tallies for 2020 were released, including the results of the fall’s renewed restrictions. The year’s total estimated global CO2 emissions had declined by around seven per cent last year compared to 2019 levels.
The results show that we can meaningfully decrease the amount of CO2, methane, aerosols and other greenhouse gases that we release into the atmosphere when we try.
They also demonstrate the scale of actions and international adherence needed to tackle global warming.
Higher-resolution analyses outlined emissions trends since 2015. In high-income countries, researchers found that emissions had declined by almost one per cent each year on average, with a further decrease of nine per cent in 2020 thanks to COVID-19.
In upper-middle-income countries, emissions growth had slowed to just 0.8 per cent per year since 2015 — cancelling out the annual average declines in high-income countries — and declined by five per cent in 2020. In lower-income countries, emissions had been increasing by an average of 4.5 per cent each year since 2015, but dropped by nine per cent last year.
That’s the good news.
The less-good news is that the pandemic is a blip. We may feel differently, confined to our combined-office–kitchen–kids’ playroom spaces for one interminable Blursday, but to the planet, a year is nothing.
Other researchers are showing that, when it comes to the overall amount of greenhouse gases warming up our atmosphere and changing the chemistry in our oceans, last year’s emission reductions will have, at best, only a small impact and may even be undetectable.
In addition, natural cycles in global atmosphere and ocean systems can cause slow rises and falls in world temperature that mask our influence on the climate.
For significant impact on climate trends to occur, the cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions have to remain deep and they have to be sustained.
It requires a drastically different way of going about business and a different way of looking at the economy, economic growth and quality of life — perspectives that may well be lost in the rush to ramp up the economy here and elsewhere after the pandemic.
